The Chemistry of Tears (20 page)

Yes, yes, I really was.

THE ENTRANCE TO MY
flat was a high library, much narrower than the thirty-nine inches legally stipulated for London passageways. The shelves were pale soft coachwood which was silky to touch. Every shelf was illuminated by low-temperature lights. On the floor was an old Tabriz rug which looked a lot better than it really was.

It was a jewel box, and I always adjusted the lights so my visitor would get the full effect. By “my visitor,” I mean Matthew. I had rarely admitted anybody else. In the case of Eric, it would be necessary, if one was to be polite, to step outside in order to admit him.

When the door bell rang that night, I opened the door to discover,
not Eric, but ghosts and mirrors of my lovely man, his two sons, dark-eyed in the rain.

The older boy wore his trousers as Matthew did—pleated, narrow-waisted. St. Vincent de Paul most likely, but super-elegant. This was the mathematician, Angus. He had his father’s hair, exactly, the big nose, the full-lipped humorous mouth.

“Come in,” I said, and stepped outside. They backed away like frightened horses.

The young one was the taller, Noah. In photographs he had also been the prettier but now he had a fuzzy beard and his hair was raging, tufted, hacked at with nail scissors I would say.

“Please go in.” My hands were trembling.

“We’re sorry,” said Angus. He had hand-painted the buttons on his shirt. In this light they looked like Indian miniatures.

“Well, I refuse to have you standing in the rain.”

Noah looked accusingly at his brother.

“We’re sorry,” Angus said, then walked briskly through my library. Noah followed, ducking at the door. He had mud on his boots and I didn’t mind. I was looking at his father’s long runner’s legs.

Noah stroked a coachwood shelf, as if checking on my housekeeping while covertly identifying a rainforest timber. He was the greenie. He was also the classics genius. He had, at the age of fourteen, come home drunk and vomited in his bed. Never having met him, I had lived with him for years and years.

I found them shuffling on my durrie, the sort of pale delicate rug only childless people have. They did not know what to do with their bodies. So I chose the Nelson Case Study day bed and sat on one end. Then Noah sat opposite on a Gustav Axel Berg whose eighty-year-old bentwood torqued beneath his weight.

Finally, Angus chose the other end of the day bed. Even from that distance the beautiful creature smelled musty and unwashed.

The stolen blue cube was sitting in the middle of the magazine table. Noah clearly followed my gaze. He was his father’s son. He picked up the cube.

“May I smoke?” he asked.

“Of course.”

He produced a pouch of tobacco, balanced Carl’s toy on one knee.

Poor boys I thought—their dear eyes, great dark pools of hurt, more like each other than like their father—low brows, a terrible silent mental concentration. On what I did not know. But they carried Matthew’s beauty, their sinew, bone, the square set of their shoulders, that same lovely nose.

“I’ll fetch an ashtray.”

I thought, when I give it to him I’ll take the cube away, I don’t know why, but by the time I returned he’d tucked it deep between his legs.

“We have never really met,” I said to his brother.

“No, not really.”

“But you are Angus?”

“Yes.”

“I’m the troubled child,” Noah said, and placed Carl’s cube back on the table. “I’m Noah. And you are Catherine Gehrig. I Googled you.”

Silence.

“Can I have a drink?” asked Noah.

I knew Matthew did not wish me to give him alcohol.

“Do you have any beer?”

“Just some red wine, and a little whisky.”

“Whisky,” he said, and held my gaze.

I looked to his older brother. He shook his head. “I’m the designated driver.”

When I first met his father, Noah had been in trouble for making a joke about a gay camel. He was just a little boy. He had thought it was funny, that a camel might be gay. The school had different opinions.

“Weird, huh?” I called as I poured the whisky in the kitchen. The “huh” sounding so old, so fake.

“What?”

I fetched a glass of water and delivered this together with the
whisky. Angus was standing in front of the framed photograph of the stables.

“It’s strange, us three, here all together,” I said as the child drank his whisky straight. “I’m sorry if this is awful for you.”

“Did you like it there?” Angus asked, gazing at the photograph. He was being an adult, smelling like a teenage boy.

I stood beside him. “I don’t think you did.”

He produced his Frankenpod or Space Onion or whatever. “Have you ever Googled it? Would you like to see?”

Of course I did not wish to look. “All right,” I said.

Angus sat on the day bed, with me on his left side. We crouched over the gadget, not quite touching, and there it was, the stables seen from space, the line of cliff, the trees, the grey roof in the shade.

It was nighttime now in Suffolk, but the daylight image was no less disturbing for being captured in the past. The satellite had spied on us during the summer of the drought, the brown grass, the dying tree. I could make out the Norton Commando so the pair of us were there, alive together, unaware.

“We must have been inside,” I said, and then I was embarrassed to imagine what they thought: all that stinky sex. “Did you feel I stole your father from you?”

“Let’s face it,” Noah said. “You did.”

There was some unspoken current of conversation between them.

“No, it wasn’t you,” Angus said, but I must have existed everywhere around them.

Noah left the room and—don’t ask me why—I snatched Carl’s cube and sat it on the shelf behind me.

When he returned with the whisky bottle, he spoke directly to his older brother. “We were going to tell the truth. That’s what we agreed.”

My heart sank.

Noah’s mouth, like his father’s, was an instrument of infinite nuance. He was staring at the shelf above my head, and although he was almost certainly amused, I had no idea what he was thinking.

Then Angus removed the framed photograph from the wall. I have never liked people fiddling with my things but I forgot that when I saw how sad and grimy my walls had become.

“This is yours now,” Angus said.

I was so tense I thought he meant my photograph and I was outraged that he should have assumed the power to give me what was mine.

“Do you mean this?”

“The stables, yes. It’s yours.”

My heart did leap at that, but of course they were boys and they knew a great deal less than I did. Matthew and I had talked about his will. He had wished to maintain our secrets after death and if I had been hurt by that, it had not been for long.

“You’re very sweet. I wish it was.”

Noah picked up the whisky bottle and we all watched while it surrendered the last four drops.

“It is yours.” Noah had that slightly off-putting confidence young public schoolboys bring to the workplace. I wanted to say, I saw your father’s will, you brat. He signed it in 2006 and I can promise you that Catherine Gehrig does not even have a walk-on part.

“Dad couldn’t leave it to you, of course,” Angus said.

“No, of course not.” He was pushing all my buttons all at once. For thirteen years I had been made invisible by this family even while I was subsumed by them, their maths problems and their vomiting. I didn’t mind. I really didn’t mind.

“He left it to us.”

“Quite right,” I said, my bitterness a secret, even from myself.

“He could hardly write your name in his will.”

Well, he could, I thought, although I would never have asked him to. “It would have looked a little odd to your mother.” I smiled as best I could.

“We’ve talked about it, Noah and I. And as we are the new owners we have decided you shall have it as long as you live.”

There were too many emotions in the room, but the two young men were keeping themselves together, both of them with their big hands upon their knees.

“It’s called a peppercorn rent. We have brought the lease for you to sign. You pay one peppercorn a year, that’s it.”

“We brought the Mini here, to give to you.”

“Really? Did you do all this on your own?”

“A friend of Dad’s. He helped us think about the lease.”

“This would be Mr. Croft?”

“He has been very nice to us.”

“He registered the car in whose name?”

Neither of them seemed to know.

“We parked it outside.”

“We washed it, but it rained.”

“You are very sweet, but I can’t drive.” This was not really true.

“You could learn,” said Angus. “It’s surprisingly easy.”

“I could teach you,” Noah said. “I did an advanced driving course, skid pans, everything.”

I could say nothing in response. I was too moved, too sad, too furious. My young protectors somehow saw I was about to cry. They quickly agreed they would keep the Mini somewhere safe for me and that we would meet to talk about the driving lessons. I signed the lease and gave them both a peppercorn and in minutes we were in the library where I was held in a musty smelly sort of rugger hug. Matthew, in their bones.

When they had gone I lay on my bed and thought about the breeze brushing our naked skin in the summer, the storms rocking us in winter, the German Sea gnawing at the bottom of the cliff.

AT THE ANNEXE
, at this early hour, I delete you, my darling, my beloved, with your wide soft mouth against my neck. I would rather scrub your bones and place them in the open air, scrub your sternum, labour at your spine, scrub and scrub, with love, each vertebra, as
particular as a nose, and lay you in the grass amongst the bluebells. There on your secret triangle of land I would be your most submissive tenant, would lie beside you until rain, wind, storms raced, threaded like shoelaces through our missing eyes.

Such thoughts as these are mine, at the moment Amanda enters from her world where the Gulf of Mexico has become a lake of oil. Does she have a mythology or cosmology for this?

“Hello,” she says when she has dumped her backpack.

“Hello,” I say. Delete, I think.

Looking up, it is clear to me that she has a new lover. She has baggy indigo trousers and a sleeveless top like silverfish. Inside these loose coverings is a body so young as to make one weep. Her attention is on the swan. Please, please, I need no more fantastical nonsense. Please learn to see what is before you here and now.

She says, “What I am about to say is none of my business.”

The hair rises on my neck. I delete a letter I have not even read.

“I only want to help.”

I read, archive, spam, delete.

“It is so painful watching you,” she says.

“It is just a swan, Amanda. A machine.”

“Miss Gehrig, this does not have to take weeks. It could be done in minutes. You do not have to torture yourself like this.”

She is offering me a small plastic object which, in my fear and rage, I mistake for a cigarette lighter. It has one of those crude non-words in white type on its side. A part emerges from the black sheath, steel, like lipstick.

“You just create a new folder for your email, archive it, and export the archive to a flash drive.”

“What’s a flash drive?”

“This.” She sort of
thrusts
it at me, which I do not like at all.

“I could download it for you. In a second.”

“I’m fine, thank you.” She works for me, she reports to me, but even as I refuse her help she attempts to get around me.

“Amanda, what is it that you imagine I am up to?”

But she will not answer. “All I’m saying is—you don’t have to spend hours and hours like this. It must be hell.”

“Who told you?”

But she is intent on controlling my computer.

“It was Mr. Croft who told you?”

Her doll-like eyes are wet with unwanted sympathy. At the same time her irises are very wide, like a creature living in the dark.

“Please, please let me just …” And she has slid between me and the machine, typing as she speaks. “You can take it home and load it on your own computer. Is it a Mac?”

“No. It’s a PC. So, obviously it will not work.”

She looks over her shoulder, appraising me as if I am a dangerous beast, holding my eye all the while. Up close, she smells strangely musty. Then I see her fingernails are dirty.

“You know who these emails are from?” I ask her.

“They’re loading now.”

“Who told you, Amanda?”

“We both know who told me.” She places the tiny object in my hands. She wraps my fingers around it. Some subtle shift of power has been effected.

“Miss Gehrig, he worries about you.”

“No.”

“All he can think about is that you be looked after.”

“But we can’t say who he actually is.”

“No.”

“Although we already have.”

“The swan is terribly important to the museum, you know that. He has a frightful difficulty getting money as you know. He has to go around sucking up and being charming. How awful to have to beg from all those city yobs.”

Thus I am taught to suck eggs by my child assistant. But what really stings is that the sweet, pretty, clever Courtauld girl has forcibly removed Matthew from my cache. She has made me hold him like ashes in a vial.